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This patch reduces pg_am to just two columns, a name and a handler function. All the data formerly obtained from pg_am is now provided in a C struct returned by the handler function. This is similar to the designs we've adopted for FDWs and tablesample methods. There are multiple advantages. For one, the index AM's support functions are now simple C functions, making them faster to call and much less error-prone, since the C compiler can now check function signatures. For another, this will make it far more practical to define index access methods in installable extensions. A disadvantage is that SQL-level code can no longer see attributes of index AMs; in particular, some of the crosschecks in the opr_sanity regression test are no longer possible from SQL. We've addressed that by adding a facility for the index AM to perform such checks instead. (Much more could be done in that line, but for now we're content if the amvalidate functions more or less replace what opr_sanity used to do.) We might also want to expose some sort of reporting functionality, but this patch doesn't do that. Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Petr Jelínek, and rather heavily editorialized on by me.
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.